Pearls and Lace: Poems

Magdalena Klein was born in 1920, in Marghita, Romania. In 1944, she was deported with her parents and sisters from their home in Nagyvarad, Hungary (today Oradea, Romania) to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The poetic journal Magdalena kept since a teenager shows the stark contrast between her youthful love of life and the grim reality of the world around her. On the one hand are her intellectual brilliance and her confidence in herself; on the other are the apparent hopelessness of her situation.

Petite and physically frail, Magdalena was able to survive starvation, forced marches and other atrocities during the Holocaust, but not the emotional pain and nightmares, which haunted her later. Her poems bear witness to what a human being can and cannot endure.